Nuit Blanche Toronto: Finding Inspiration After the Sun Goes Down

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My friend Morry and I reached Nathan Phillips Square after sunset, long after several hundred had scattered themselves in front of Toronto’s City Hall. Somewhere among the curious and cold was Daniel Lanois. We could hear him; we could even see him projected in a dozen different places – on screens where no screens had been before, even in the reflecting pool. There was no obvious stage, but eventually we found a ramp leading up to a platform on which a few dozen had congregated. They were peering down into a pit. We did the same – and there he was, at the controls of an audio-video installation. And there he would remain until sunrise. And half the fun was finding him.

Lanois’ all-nighter was one of the hyped attractions of this year’s Nuit Blanche, an all-night free art festival held in early October at dozens of venues in and around downtown Toronto. Over the course of five years, my feelings have swung from amazement to irritation and back again. I’ve been bemused and bored. I’ve been caught up in curious crowds, and I’ve loathed the drunken hordes.

The first year was a delight. I knew nothing about Nuit Blanche. There had been some chatter about it, but it was largely word-of-mouth that drew a few hundred thousand night-owls into the streets – looking to be inspired. The high point for me was an outdoor fog installation in a leafy stretch of the University of Toronto, where I and dozens of others walked – sightless – on a meandering path drenched in fog. All other senses were heightened – the bumps of the earth beneath us, the sounds of chatter around us. Behind me, a guy telling everyone within earshot how the mushrooms he’d taken were just then kicking in.

I’ve never managed to last beyond three in the morning, and in the second year, the high point came at about 2 a.m. Exhausted, my friends and I ducked into the Music Faculty of the university, plunked ourselves down in the auditorium, and were treated to the quiet and cool sounds of a live jazz ensemble.

The following year, in front of an old downtown building known for its galleries and studio space, a small crowd had gathered for a guided tour of the building. We joined. Ten minutes into the tour, it dawned on me that this was no ordinary tour. We were, in fact, part of a performance piece – the tour guide a performance artist leading us, her audience, up and down staircases, into hidden rooms, basements and rooftop gardens. Like a general leading troops into battle, she marched on, regaling us with stories. I would have followed her anywhere.

Last year should have been the best. I knew the city inside out. I knew which areas promised inspiration. I had visiting guests and was anxious to show off the city. But the crowds from previous years had suddenly mutated into hordes. And where the leafy university area and fascinatingly dodgy outer edges of downtown had been the focus of the earlier years, now the downtown commercial strip and the financial district had suddenly become the focal point. And we were swept up, and let down, by the masses.

This year was a targeted approach. One glance at the throngs on Yonge Street, and we made for the infinitely more interesting strains of Daniel Lanois at City Hall. Curious crowds over partying hordes.

Then it was on to the newly-opened film centre, Toronto’s year-round cinematheque. In one small screening room, a handful of us filed past the empty audience seats, to the edge of the stage, where we sat, looking out into the seats. Above the seats, suspended from what appeared to be clotheslines, were sheets of varying sizes and suspended at varying heights. On each, a different looped segment of Fellini’s8½ played. Apparently curated by Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, Fellini’s fragments were hypnotic.

You create your own Nuit Blanche. With so many venues, inside and out, in so many neighbourhoods, you chart your own course. And with a bit of timing and luck, moments of inspiration might just be around the next corner.

Andrew Saikali
is a writer in Toronto, Canada, and passes his days as a copy editor with The Globe and Mail. He spends his moments of leisure listening to music, reading, watching films and prowling the streets of Toronto, and he feels that he is long-overdue for a vacation so that he can do more of those things. At any given time, he is probably pining for distant shores and really should do more traveling and less pining.

I have been at the London Book Fair for approximately eight minutes when I officially decide that I am not meant to be at the London Book Fair.
Don’t worry: I haven’t snuck in or anything. Well, it is a little iffy — at the entrance, I manage to bypass some sort of elaborate form-filling-out process when they ask for my press card and I say, almost by way of a challenge, “I’m American?” as though Americans do not have press cards. (Obviously it’s just this particular irresponsible American who doesn’t have a press card.) Miraculously, the helpful woman behind the desk nods, takes my letter of intent, and whips off a press pass. I stride blithely into the main hall at Earls Court Exhibition Centre and stop short.
It’s not the books — there are, admittedly, a lot of books, but I expected that. If anything, I expected way more books. Every stall has some sort of display of new titles, lined up and facing outward, and the big fancy stalls of the big fancy publishers have enormous images of dust jackets and headshots of celebrity authors lining their walls. There is a whole other enormous room, I learn later, and a corner of it is devoted to wholesalers and remainders and they’ve got plenty of books. I’m not exactly sure why, because I presume they have warehouses stocked with millions of them somewhere; a few-odd hundred on display strikes me as strange. But who knows — I don’t actually know much about book fairs. That much becomes abundantly clear.
What’s most noticeable in the main hall are the little tables — hundreds (thousands?) of small square tables populated by groups of two or three, heads bent close together, scribbling in notebooks. (I have never seen so many notebooks in my life, at least not in the past five years.) The conversations all look so serious, and so intimate — though the collective sound of a thousand intimate conversations is deafening. I feel adrift amongst all of this, utterly out-of-my-depth, so when I see the escalator in the center of the hall, I make a beeline for it. But it’s the second level that seals my fate: row upon row of long rectangular tables, with the names of literary agents and agencies printed above each row, and hundreds of people sitting face-to-face in deep conversation. It looks like a massive speed-dating event, except everyone has a whole lot of papers strewn around them, and they appear to actually want to talk to each other. I walk up and down the rows too quickly — no, I don’t have an appointment! — and then I do the sort of quick retreat of the overly paranoid as I rush back towards the down escalator.
I’d come to Earls Court to observe the book industry, and here it was, very “industry”-like — I am eventually given the full run-down, that the London Book Fair is specifically a rights fair, for things like international publishing rights to be orchestrated or, in the case of some of the big books of the week, for previously negotiated rights to be announced. There are author events, but not terribly many; this is primarily about business, for people who create and sell books, not for regular consumers. I’m in some sort of weird liminal space here: mostly a consumer, but a critic, of books and of the industry that makes them more broadly. Perhaps my sense of unease comes down to the fact that this isn’t the ideal place from which to do any of this criticism.
The special guest is the Korean publishing industry, and they have a huge, slick set-up in the international section, sort of like what a first-class lounge at an airport looks like in my mind, all futuristic white furniture and elegant stemware. The Sultanate of Oman has a kind of Arabian castle structure; Russia’s got this really aggressive looming thing that looks like propaganda, written in red: READ.DEEP. READ.SMART. READ.MOSCOW. I feel like I am at Epcot, but there are no rides, not even educational ones. “This is an especially large fair, right?” I ask one man. He looks a little weary as he sighs and tells me that Frankfurt is by far the biggest, twice as long as this three-day affair. All around me, I see books as pure product, and it’s a little startling. In the café, my friend and I are flanked by people making business deals while they eat lunch. “We’ll take 3,000, then,” the man to our left says to his negotiating partner, and they both make neat marks in their notebooks. On the other side, a man swipes through something on an iPad, a children’s book, maybe, or some kind of interactive platform. (There are gaming people here, too, partly because digital storytelling is blurring the lines between traditional books and games.)
The occasional appearance of an iPad — and eventually learning that in that second enormous room, there’s a whole area devoted to literally all things to do with technology, from Nook and Kindle and Kobo to metadata management platforms to print-on-demand and ebook production outsourcing services — reminds me that I’d come to the London Book Fair with a bit of an agenda: I want to figure out exactly what was going on with tech in the book industry.
Because back in October, I’d attended a day-long conference in Oxford for young people in the publishing industry, once again as more of an observer than anything else. It was illuminating to look at books from somewhere other than my usual perch, but I was more than a little alarmed by the way most people were talking about digital things. “It’s time to admit that we have to adapt,” the general line went throughout the day, which I found, frankly, shocking: the time to admit such a thing must have been a decade ago, at least. I sat and fumed when one presenter urged publishers to “try to get on Facebook and Twitter.” (Pinterest and Tumblr? Too “experimental”.) At the end-of-day reception, I interrogated the circle of people sipping wine around me. “I get the sense,” I said slowly, “that you guys actively fear incorporating technology of any kind into your working lives.” I expected an argument, but people were nodding. One woman admitted to me, “I think that we’re all hoping someone else will come along and do that work for us.”
This doesn’t make book publishing unique, by any means. But it’s strange for me, after most of the past decade embedded in the growing pains of magazines’ difficult transition to digital. The equation there seemed simpler, at least on the surface: old revenue models failed, new ones were tested, publications shuttered and others adapted — in the end, it’s all just another way to share the same information, the physical page or the tweet on a smartphone. I’m deeply biased when it comes to digital publishing, but then, I spent the past five years in a magazine department that regularly got as excited about digital design as print — perhaps more so, where design and great functionality intersected. (One of the biggest losers in the shift-to-digital magazine equation is, of course, me the writer, not me the digital production editor: when the models changed, they made room for more of our words for less of their money. But that’s another issue entirely.)
With books, the endless debate about the medium, the cheap and dirty ebook versus the august printed page, always seemed to obscure the book publishing industry’s somewhat shaky revenue models to begin with: attempts at changing the industry, the bare-minimum embrace of technology, look like weak computerized bandages on older, deeper wounds. At the conference last fall, Amazon loomed like a specter over literally every panel and talk, but it wasn’t just anger and resentment — there was a sense of real regret, too, that a company could understand the digital realities of selling books so well and still appear to actually hate books themselves.
(It’s worth noting, too, how both the LBF and the Oxford conference really hammered home what a tiny fraction of the book industry my colleagues and I interact with — publishing includes every type of book, far beyond literary fiction and what we broadly call “genre,” and there are travel books and books about dogs and sticker books and comic books and tie-in merchandise and whole enormous structures that only an industry analyst could really tackle. So it’s all well and good that I choose to buy my literary fiction at independent bookstores, but I am the tiniest fraction of a tiny fraction; there are millions of books that are being sold every year through channels that hurt writers and publishers, and, in the long run, readers, too.)
Worrying about how we’re going to read books feels like more of a distraction than anything else, the debate of an industry that sees change as something to fear, and nothing more — and I’d kind of hoped we were moving past it. But in the weeks before the London Book Fair, Tim Waterstone, the founder of the eponymous bookstore chain — one of Britain’s largest, even as outlets continue to be shuttered — made news by smugly declaring that ebook revenues were dropping and that print books were returning to exclusive dominance. "I think you read and hear more garbage about the strength of the ebook revolution than anything else I've known,” Waterstone told the Oxford Literary Festival. Later, he asserted that, “Anyone who tells you they know the future is telling you the most grotesque lie, because none of us do.”
In The Guardian, Nick Harkaway managed to gently chide Waterstone with a relatively even-handed response. “Digital will continue to grow for a while at least, and continue to exist, because it is becoming part of the world we inhabit at a level below our notice, no more remarkable than roads or supermarkets. Ebooks are here to stay because digital is, and quite shortly we'll stop having this debate about paper vs. ebooks because it will no longer make a lot of sense.” The conversation that develops in the comments (I can’t believe I’m complimenting a Guardian comment thread here) is full of thoughtful, cogent points — and someone brings up Stephen Fry’sremark that, “Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.”
I’d argue that Harkaway’s “quite shortly” should be right now — this debate makes zero sense to me, and I’m not some sort of technocrat — I do prefer reading a book on the printed page. (I read books both ways, simultaneously, and I mostly don’t think about it much. If a book is mailed to me or is sitting on a shelf in front of me, then paper; if I’m sent a digital galley or I don’t feel like leaving the house and need something ASAP, ebook it is.) But this old, sad debate talks about print and digital books as if they weren’t two sides of the same coin. Worry about book sales dropping more broadly, and start to think about the real ways that digital can reshape books. The sorts of things that were written and printed have always evolved with technological advances in printing and distribution. I want to hear more conversations about breaking structures as they exist now — the size and shape of works that get published, or connecting writers and readers in webs rather than long, bulky, top-down chains, or using technology to make the industry as efficient as possible — to free up everyone to simply publish the very best writers.
It’s easy for me to say. And I don’t actually have any concrete ideas, just some sort of utopian vision of the future of publishing. At my second day at the LBF, I attend a panel on digital copyright, and they, too, see the problems and abstract solutions — but no clear way to implement them, at least not yet. At the “digital hub,” there are some dispiriting presentations, one of which appears to be a woman showing images of her imprint’s print and digital books, side by side, and that’s about it. But there are innovative gamblers from tech companies all over the world, too, pitching new ideas that work to break down the old structures. Some of them seem gimmicky, but some seem like things we might actually need. We just need to get everyone interested in considering breaking the mold a bit — shucking off Band-Aids for a shift in perspective.
The biggest takeaway from the London Book Fair? The free tote bags. Yes, you heard it here first. There are pens, too, but the totes are where it’s at. I collect four on the first day, even though I own duplicates of two already — one from Granta, one from Foyles. It’s near the end of the second day that I see a spate of official LBF totes hanging on peoples’ shoulders — with my seasoned tote-bag eye, I can tell by their stiffness that they have just been removed from a box and distributed within the past half hour, maybe even less. I assault a woman carrying one in her hand, and she points me to the information desk. “It looks like there’s one left,” the woman there says, pointing to a rack maybe thirty feet away. “You might have to —” I break into a sprint.
Image courtesy the author

We here at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop have been surprised to find ourselves - for lack of a better word - trending. From Eric Bennett’s allegations in “How Iowa Flattened Literature” to n+1’s book MFA vs NYC, we really didn’t think there was more to say about our institution...and then Hannah Horvath, in an odd twist of fictional life becoming reality, was accepted on Girls.
Of course we were excited by the buzz. But in this larger discussion, we found that something was lacking: namely, the view from Iowa City. Right here, right now.
So: here it is.
On a dismal midwinter Thursday, we – eighteen current students of the Writers’ Workshop, poets and fiction writers alike - set out to chronicle one ordinary 24-hour period in our lives. That February 13th, we took copious notes. We worked, whether on our novels or on our Twitter accounts. Some of us taught classes. Some of us went to a poetry reading and after-party. And some of us just ran around tossing Valentines into each other’s houses.
My colleagues’ responses may vary widely in form, ranging from poems to stories to lyric essays, but all of them are, like my colleagues, entertaining. And furthermore: excerpts from their responses, when laid out to roughly span those 24 hours, give a decent picture of what it’s actually like to be a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop right now – that is, to be one of many people all striving to do the same difficult thing, in the same moderately-sized city, at the same talked-about school.
Hannah Horvath: take note.
On waking:(Van Choojitarom, second-year fiction)
Van is having trouble leaving his apartment. The problem today is getting dressed. It's not that Van is particularly vain or fastidious. It's that as he's putting on his suit and necktie he invariably begins delivering a bad guy monologue to the bathroom mirror. Welcome to my island, Mr. Bond, the solid grey suit seems to say. Sometimes he can cut it down, but other times, some inner Hans Gruberian impulse cannot be checked and he ends up trying on all his different coats in front of the mirror, regardless of the actual weather, lapels folded over his throat, inveigling the ceiling, delivering solid broadly humanitarian, ultimately Marxist reasons for Bruce Willis to surrender.
This morning he's fixated on a grey plaid double breasted jacket that puts in him in mind of Mads Mikkelsen's Hannibal Lecter. It seems to be driving him to wider, patterned ties: “I don't really think your story has POV problems, Will. I just wanted to see how you'd react...”
(Jessie Hennen, second-year fiction)
Every morning I wake up and Colin is still asleep. Usually I lie there for twenty minutes and try to ease myself out of the bed without him noticing, but inevitably he does. “Stay,” he says, not quite awake. Then I have to sound like an absolute bitch and say that I am done sleeping, that I have things to accomplish. Really it is that I am sick of looking at the light fixture, at the sky coming in bright against my peach-colored curtain, the ceiling shimmering like the northern lights. While I look at the ceiling I think too much about the future.
“I can’t sleep in any more. I have to finish (x),” I always say. Today (x) is a novel chapter about giant deep-sea fish who grow weary of being imprisoned in a tank and incite their angry brethren to make the oceans swim with rage.
“Oh, okay,” he says, but he doesn’t let go. Frida the cat sits in the middle of the bed, meowing. I suppose she is cozy. I tell him I had a very episodic dream. “I was surviving the Rapture with my family. Our house was under siege, people kept throwing rocks at our windows, everyone wanted in. Finally the call came from heaven, and our whole house floated up into the sky above the angry mobs. I almost got Left Behind because I was drinking a beer, but I tossed it out and we made it to heaven.
“Heaven, it turned out, looked a lot like Milwaukee. Very small houses, a very bright sky. The powers that be were keeping us in a strip mall until they could find proper heavenly places for us. It was packed - kind of a shantytown, really. It had a barter economy going. Some guy had a computer with Facebook, and I convinced him to check mine. Jen Percy had been posting these really great photos of Hell. As it turns out, Hell is a dusty Victorian with vintage drapes and canopy beds. I wasn’t sure whether she was there on assignment, or permanently.”
“Well, you have to include that,” he says, and we get up.
On teaching:(David Kruger, second-year poet)
I walk through a parking lot, down a flight of outside stairs and into an old brick building where I teach what is essentially Basket Weaving 101, but instead of palm fronds and twigs, I talk as vaguely as possible about metaphors.
Today I say things like: student A, you need more flesh and muscle for that prostitute in your car, and Student B, the statue of David you encounter during your trip to Florence might be thought of as symbolic of the patriarchy and therefore of the trials you and your gal-pals endure. Student C’s story is about the big game, and so I simply point to Plot Mountain on the board and suggest that stakes, when raised, are like little plateaus for the reader to climb and consider.
Toward the end of all of this, I really have to pee.
(Mallory Hellman, second-year fiction) 4:07 pm - I’m late to pick everyone up, and I’m the one leading our lesson today. When I pull up to Dey House, all four of my fellow Youth Writing Project volunteers are assembled on a snowbank waiting for me. One holds a bag full of construction paper. Another shivers under a hat with long ear flaps. Troopers. They get in, and I gently disrespect the speed limit until we’ve reached Cedar Rapids.
4:45 pm – Our gang of ten is happy to see us, even though we didn’t come bearing snacks. We cluster three tables together in the classroom and hang up our laminated Writing Club sign.
5:15 pm - Teonie, who is eight, has written an ode to tacos and nachos. Most of it is a meditation on her two favorite foods’ similarities, concluding with a tenderly inflected, “Are you sisters?” This leads, naturally, to a heated debate about which foods are sisters, which are brothers, which might be cousins, and which aren’t related at all.
5:45 pm – Lasagna and calzones are parents to spaghetti. Pizza is a cousin, on the calzone side of course. Macaroni wants to be in the family but isn’t – it rolls with the hot dish instead. Peaches and plums go hand in hand, but mangoes and green peppers have never met. Avocados and pears hate it when they’re mistaken for sisters.
(Matthew Weiss, first-year fiction)
Taught Interpretation of Literature. Big old room. Clonking around in my shoes.
Talked about the etymology of the word symbol.
It originally meant two shards of a ceramic pot broken at the moment two parties made a deal. Later, you’d know things were legit if the two pot shards fit back together.
Hence Plato’s: man is a symbol of himself, looking for his other half.
Also, a symbol could mean: a chance meeting, a receipt, a watchword, or a Pythagorean cult password.
For example, the Pythagoreans would recognize a brother by muttering things like, “What is the sea?” and getting back, “The tear of Kronos!”
Lost track of time. Possibly I showed the kids a clip from the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I claimed was “symbolic.”
They’d never heard of 2001: A Space Odyssey before.
(Patrick Connelly, first-year fiction)
There is a girl in the hall where I teach rhetoric. She looks like she is about eighteen, nineteen years old. I always see her. She is hunched in an electric wheelchair with her wrists and her neck bent and her chin down. She isn’t quadriplegic; I have seen her hands and fingers move. I think she has a neuromuscular disease. Her body is small. She is sitting against the wall, alongside the other kids, waiting for the classrooms to empty. To be honest, I try not to think about her beyond the end of the hall (outside, at Prairie Lights Café, at the gym, at home, and then at a party after a poetry reading), but I can’t help it. Today is different. When I pass her, she is playing Bejeweled on her iPad Mini, swapping the colors around the screen with her finger; she is bored.
In class, I ask for a show of hands. Who’s read To Kill a Mockingbird?I get up and talk about empathy. You can never really understand a person until you climb into her skin and walk around in it. You can’t understand a controversy or advocate for a proper solution until you’re able to consider things from other people’s point of view.
Is simply being aware of something or someone any good? Because I probably won’t ever talk to this girl in the hall. I will only write about her.
I should ask my students what they think.
(Misty Woodford, third-year poet)
On the way home from teaching, I'm thinking about trochees, and this happens: “GUTzon/BORglum/GUTzon/BORglum/GUTzon/BORglum” - by now I'm stomping out the rhythm as I walk – and I don't realize I'm also saying this out loud until I near my apartment building, and see a figure freeze up on the lawn. It's the guy who lives in the basement and I've scared him this time. I start to walk normally, more pyrrhic, I guess, and say, “Hello!”
He says “Hi” and attends to his cigarette. Dinner is multiple cups of tea and the hope that chamomile and valerian work tonight.
On writing:(Thomas Corcoran, second-year fiction)
After rereading the last day’s work, I begin the current day’s session, writing on a 1971 Olympia SM-9 typewriter with a 12-point font similar to Garamond. Typewriters are useful when the desire is more to make daily advances on a draft than to polish the prose. Before being written, sentences are usually imagined but not too precisely; and except for the occasional “xxxx” (over which I always feel a pang), corrections are simply too hard to make in great number. As with writing generally the challenge is to convert insights that might have limitless depth but no duration into sentences that are stretched out in length but constrained by their gathered energy, like ocean waves striking the shore. After a lot of practice the prose is reasonably good in this format anyway. The rhythm of the typing helps. What may still be needed are selection, precision, and courage.
(Dini Parayitam, second-year fiction)
...This place is about vulnerability. Every second of it is a lie you tell yourself. “I belong here. I am happy here. I am happiest here among people like me.” Really you are very hyper-conscious of the fact that you aren’t actually happy here. Being with so many people who do these things that you love better than you makes you question why you are worthy of doing it at all in the first place.
This is what Iowa Writers’ Workshop teaches you:
1. The wish to write a good story is fake.
2. The will to write a good story cannot be trusted.
3. The insecurity you feel when you are done is normal.
4. The insanity of the writer is a very real thing.
(Andy Axel, first-year poet)
“Observatory Log: 13 February 2014 Iowa City”
1 discreet tree relief
10 a whole class chanting what sounds like “TOGA” with increasing speed
11 dough-faced boy in american flag vest with cup not actually from starbucks
12 prime view of the capitol from the waiting room
1 the word “widowed” on a dropdown menu
2 when I see more than three robins in the same place I start to get suspicious
3 I check to see whether I’m wearing a sweater
5 child ode to cat:
“Feliz: you are not like a garbage can.
You are like a light when you surprise me.
Do you speak Spanish?”
6 when I enter the Dey House it smells like ink and xmas
7 my view field’s all baldspot
11 dogs express interest in the terrible smell of my boots
12 enough of weather
(Jake Andrews, first-year fiction)
After lunch, I sat down to write. The main character’s girlfriend had just walked into his room and told him some good news. He recollects: “Had I ever thought about sex as a way to celebrate academic achievement?” (I, the author, certainly have; Daniel was a bit more surprised.) The story had taken a turn I wasn’t expecting, and I was stuck. So I started cleaning up my desktop (the one on my computer, not the one on which the computer usually sits, though it wasn’t there on this day in any case; I was sitting in a chair in the living room because – to re-emphasize the solitude that prompts reflection – my wife was out).
I stumbled on a collection of photos that my step-mom had put together for my dad’s funeral back in December. I had downloaded them and forgotten about the folder.
Two photos in particular jumped out at me. In the first one, my dad has me on his shoulders. I can’t be two months old. (My mother remembers taking this picture and being horrified.) My head peeks out above his hair, and his hands hold me in place. My pudgy feet are almost to his chin. In spite of the 1970s glasses, he looks remarkably like my middle brother, mainly because he is skinnier than he was in later life. He’s smiling like a kid – he would’ve been 20 – and looking at the camera. I’m gazing off to the left, my hands gripping his hair, my face – wide cheeks and a small chin – looking remarkably like my own son’s the day we removed him from life support.
In the second photo, my dad isn’t looking at the camera, but he’s still smiling. He’s on all fours, and I’m crawling between his arms, probably just over six months old. My left hand is raised, reaching for a balloon. If you look close enough, you can see that he’s holding it for me. My straight blond hair has lost the red hue from the earlier photo; like my nephew, I’ve got pudgy cheeks and pudgy fingers. I’m in motion. There’s a blur to my hand.
I don’t really know how long I looked at the photos in the folder. I didn’t write for a while after finding them. I made myself a cup of tea.
On readings and parties:(Sean Zhuraw, second-year poet)
A friend, SE S, sees the stich of my saccades trailing the runaway cambus down Clinton Street, sees I’ve missed the bus.
She gives me a ride to the doctor.
My eyes are fine.
Try this when looking at something, she says, after looking at it, look away.
Take sanitary breaks, she says.
Take mind off.
There are layers among the distances, magnifications.
Her assistant returns to dilate my pupils.
When the doctor leans into my eye, she says, don’t look at the light; keep focus past it.
I buy a few Valentines.
I live in a small town, so on the way home I stop by JM’s house, open her door, sneak into her kitchen, stuff a rabbit down the back of her shirt.
It says, Ears Hopping you’ll be mine.
I also make one Valentine from two.
They’re angels unless you mess with their halos – the TV’s ad.
Later, I catch myself eating a sandwich in a mirror. It is the only way I can see what my hands are on.
Ditto the poetry reading that night.
Language is an organ, he says, not just sensate but reciprocal too.
Q: Do the eyes rhyme with their host?
A: I don’t know. I keep checking to see if it’s changed.
(Laura Ferris, first-year poet)
Now that my schedule for the day has played out, I feel less certain of how I spent my time. Tomorrow I know I am going to the library to do more research for my historical-ish surrealist-adjacent poem, spending hours at a microfilm scanner. I consider going out because I'm supposed to be writing about my day, but ultimately decide I don't care enough about making the day seem like anything.
I watch more episodes of Sailor Moon with Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune, think about to what extent I care about Valentine’s Day. I want to say that I usually do more, write more, than this. Today, though, I’m spent, uninspired, and a little lonely – and unable to go out.
(Will Jameson, first-year poet)
Anthony and Elyse and Jordan and I are drinking gin and tonics. Elyse doesn’t have a lime but she has a lemon. We finished the pepperoni and mushroom pizza from Falbo’s we’d ordered which was a circle cut into squares. Jordan is playing Drake on his computer and Anthony is drawing a grid in his notebook that plots where our poetics stand in relation to each other. It looks like a sketch of Orion without the helpful lines drawn in between to illuminate the figure. Elyse reads aloud some Norman Dubie. Anthony reads aloud some James Tate. Then we keep talking about ourselves.
(D.R. Simonds, second-year poet)
“The Willow Tree on the West Bank, Iowa River”
For Emma Woodhouse
Near the "Train Only" bridge we footbridge, you burn
willow branches two at a time, saying
you know I know
how to respond
in a heartbreaking situation, (having broken
hearts before), spine-burn
running thru your hands, but the other
white-hot willows nearby
I am never showing you, my first impulse for our survival
I can’t never show you.
(Jerika Marchan, second-year poet)
I want to be original and smart. I want to not feel guilty about eating half a chocolate bar for breakfast. I don’t eat microwave dinners. I want to delude myself into health. I listen to this interview on Iowa Public Radio because I feel like I can participate and because the conversation is smart. People feel strongly about things and I can, too. I Can Too.
I go downstairs and make a bean burrito. The door to the house is usually left unlocked, and as I’m guiltily overstuffing my burrito, someone busts in to tuck in the tag hanging out of my dress and leave me a Valentine. I scream for a long time.
Jessie gets home and asks if I wanna go to Meredith’s for pad thai and sake. Yes get me out of this house, I’m full of burrito. (I will eat only bunny-amounts of pad thai is what I tell myself.) Pad thai happens in a sake-induced fog. (Meredith googles “what’s in sake bombs?”) Meredith and I successfully open a very-difficult-to-open jar of organic coconut oil. I bust my ass trying to sit on what I thought was a chair but really was a cookie sheet resting on a chair, and I fall to the ground. It’s kinda nice. (Is that weird?) I haven’t fallen on my ass in a while. It’s nice to know what it feels like from time to time.
Jessie and I tell Mere about my ongoing boob-angst, and she looks at me for a quick second before deciding that I’m at least a D-cup.
(Rachel Milligan, second-year poet) I wake up at noon, spend the day reading Maggie Nelson'sBluets on the couch, lighting three candles, blowing them out, and then lighting them again. I have a glass of wine before the Richard Kenney and Carol Light reading. My night concludes with one of my best friends scream-singing at me, perched on top of the refrigerator.
(Cassidy McFadzean, first-year poet)
After dinner, we walk to Dey House for Richard Kenney’s reading. Nathan slips on the ice outside our apartment, but he doesn’t see the blood on his hand until he leaves a mark on the door of the workshop. He wipes it off. We sit with Will, with Connor in front of us. The three of us were in Rick’s workshop last semester, and I see the other seven students scattered around the room. Rick refuses the microphone and reads a mix of riddles, charms, and pun-filled haikus, occasionally stepping out from behind the podium to address us, bringing his words closer to our ears.
The after party’s at Will’s and I make him show me the group pictures he took of our class last semester. I feel nostalgic. I eat pita chips and hummus and talk with Connor and Nikki about the classes we’re teaching. I talk with Winter about the buttons on the sleeves of her dress. I talk with Clare about how amazing Hy-Vee is, though she does not share my sentiments. I talk with Chad about Canadian poets, and Petro about Trailer Park Boys.
Every party proceeds the same: the bass gets turned up, the lights get dimmed down. Someone plays Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own.” We talk about how every party ends this way. It’s around midnight, and some of us leave, and some of us stay.
Image Credit: J.Y. "Warmer is not warm."

A whirlwind weekend in steamy NYC has drawn to a close. Somehow this year I managed to spend even less time than last year on the BEA floor, but as usual the real action was elsewhere. For example, Thursday night's LBC party was quite an affair. Garth and Noah were along for the ride, and, with our superior numbers we were able to meet and chat up quite a few folks. It was good to see Mark, Sarah, Ed, Bud, Dan, Anne, the folks from LitMinds, Carolyn (who took pictures), Jessica, Megan, Levi, James Marcus, and likely several other bloggers who I'm forgetting. We also met the NYer'sJames Surowiecki, and someone pointed Colson Whitehead out to me.Garth and I dragged ourselves out to BEA Friday morning. After some drama in the press office ("What do you mean I'm not registered!?"), I got to meet Garth's publisher for his forthcoming book. We also hit the booths for a number of our favorite indie houses. Some of the bigger publishers had free books on hand, but mostly their booths were like crowded movie theater lobbies: plush carpet on the floor and flashy posters on the walls. We also hit the NBCC's "Ethics in Book Reviewing" panel, about which more in a future post.After lunch with several of the bloggers, Garth and I couldn't bring ourselves to return to the convention, and we never would. However, after an afternoon spent recharging, we were ready to hit the party in Brooklyn being thrown by A Public Space, Soft Skull, and others. The music was loud and the bar was open. Garth introduced me to a number of his colleagues on the Brooklyn literary scene, and I also ran into an old friend from my Book Soup days. When the beer ran out, a band of us headed over to a party (secret password "boiled peanuts") being thrown by cookbook luminaries, Matt and Ted Lee. There we noshed on the aforementioned peanuts, spotted Colson Whitehead again, and had a few more gratis beverages. After this, we hightailed it over to the Village to watch the multi-talented Noah play in his band, which is headed up by old friend Colin Steel.Garth and I ended the night in the wee hours with a long walk back over the Brooklyn Bridge. Waking up late on Saturday morning, little thought was given to returning to the convention, and I spent the rest of the weekend recuperating and relaxing.A quick observation: whereas last year blogs were new and strange, this time around they seemed to have fully accepted and assimilated into the publishing behemoth. Nobody that I met at the convention or the parties batted an eye at the bloggers.